SpankyMcFarland

No, his lies are qualitatively different from what we have seen before. They don't bend the truth, they break it into smithereens every day of the week.

I must be too old to understand this. In my day....

Really scary. Who are these people?

Being offended by lies is hardly a partisan matter. Trump offended Cruz as much as anybody with his musings on the JFK assassination and his message is nativist rather than right or left. Few were keen on Hillary but Trump's lies are off the scale. They are way beyond the acceptable level of deceit that we expect from politicians. As PJ O'Rourke put it:

I'm not getting paid by this publication, honest, but this article by Russian journalist, Masha Gessen (now based in New York which is probably a good idea), is such a good analysis of Trump's alternative fact tendency that I am going to post it yet again. In essence, for Putin and Trump, lying is an expression of power, showing who is able to alter reality: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/13/putin-paradigm-how-trump-will-rule/

Has anybody ever encountered a US Presidential spokesperson as angry and nutty as Sean Spicer? He needs to watch a few Ari Fleischer tapes to see how it should be done. Ari is even willing to offer some free advice: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ari-fleischer-advises-sean-spicer-to-correct-any-wrong-statistics-he-used/

Evan Solomon is an articulate addition to CTV.

Not hacked but the Russkies were helping one team only.

I don't recall offering an opinion on any of those matters - must say my fantasies generally run in other directions.

Being born abroad does not make one a foreigner for life. I hope we can agree on that at least.

Can you really buy a nation's land like that, though? Doesn't it sound a bit dodgy? It's not a simple question and reminds me of an attempt by a Newfoundlander to sell the water in a lake to the Americans which might have opened up all lakes to similar sales in the country under NAFTA. Fortunately, Chretien stepped in and stopped the deal. Is Yasser Arafat the only Palestinian? Why was he born in Cairo? Weren't many Jewish settlers born abroad as well? Stables and horse come to mind.

The meaning of alternative facts in Trumpworld: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/13/putin-paradigm-how-trump-will-rule/

One fact I know. Take a man's land and he will hate you.

There's SOMETHING going on between Trump and the Russians. It could simply be they have the same way of doing things: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/13/putin-paradigm-how-trump-will-rule/ or that Trump seeks bigger, badder mobster buddies: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/trump-russian-mobster-tokhtakhounov-miss-universe-moscow

Howard Hughes was allegedly the same, willing to ignore an obvious source of bacteria.

Good man.

This is one place it is going: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yrjö_von_Grönhagen And as for the 'Nazi Palestinian Cause' which I of course support wholeheartedly, I don't expect you to support them too. Each to his own. The Finns did not confine themselves to fighting on Finnish soil and they definitely assisted the Nazi war machine. I'm sure I'm about to be accused of thread drift here so I will bid adieu.

That would depend on a rather liberal interpretation of the national territory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_military_administration_in_Eastern_Karelia Notice the lingo used to justify this: The Continuation War and a trust in a quick German victory over the Soviet Union once again gave rise to Finnish irredentism.[2] The legality of the Finnish claims on Eastern Karelia was justified by both ethno-cultural and military security factors.[2] During the spring of 1941, when the Finnish political leadership understood the full extent of the German plans concerning the Soviet Union, president Ryti commissioned professor of geography Väinö Auer and historian Eino Jutikkala to demonstrate "scholarly" that Eastern Karelia formed a natural part of the Finnish living space.[3] The resulting book Finnlands Lebensraum ("Finland's Living Space") was published in the autumn of 1941, and was intended to legitimize Finnish claims and actions to the international audience.[3] A similar book by historian Jalmari Jaakkola, Die Ostfrage Finnlands ("Finland's Eastern Question") was published in the summer of the same year.[4]

Of course, this is a problem in many wars. Britain branded Napoleon a tyrant and enemy of freedom if you don't mind, a notion that has stuck to this day in the Anglosphere, while happily allying itself with a far worse one in the Tsar.

Did the Finns worry unduly about what was happening to Jews and Russians etc. across the Eastern Front? Their actions had concrete consequences.

That's all true but they did end up providing concrete assistance to the Nazis' push into Russia with all the horrors that entailed. Are they the only Axis ally that gets a pass? You could apply the same argument to the Palestinians, the Irish revolutionaries of 1916 who spoke of 'our gallant allies in Europe', and Indians who allied with the Japanese.

No national cause belongs to one man and that was a long time ago. Right now the West Bank is being fractured into little pieces from which it will be impossible to create a state. For simple ethnic nationalists like Bennett that is a good outcome but for others who want Israel to remain part of the Western club it will pose serious problems. BTW one blind spot I find really striking is the pass Finland gets for actually fighting with the Nazis. I hear criticism of Swedish and Irish neutrality on a regular basis and lots of stuff about the Mufti but the Finns never seem to come up. Must be a conspiracy.

It is hard to avoid Facebook these days although I do my best. My university reunion and distant relatives force me to correspond there. I try to give as little info away as possible but the settings can be tricky in that regard. I notice when somebody in my neck of the woods gets into legal trouble these days, the journos go straight to the Facebook account to put as much personal stuff up as they can.

I'm upset? Did you ever hear the expression, 'Play the ball, not the man'? Take a look at the length and tone of the some of the other contributions to this debate even just here over the years. I have passion for all sorts of things that don't come up in this forum on a regular basis, mainly in Europe, and the Middle East is not exactly high on my priority list. All I am saying is that each side has its arguments on the land which I can't be bothered getting into too deeply. For the Palestinians, Muslim or Christian, the land matters. I am merely pointing out my perception of such rows about land around the world. On the wider ME question, Palestine's neighbours should certainly have taken the refugees in and given them full citizenship instead of treating them like pawns. South Vietnam is an odd choice to pick. The Americans backed a lousy horse there - a regime seen by many of its own people as a corrupt and too Christian oligarchy. A lot of the Viet Cong were local and fought far better than the South Vietnamese Army in the opinion of most US military memoirs. The two sides saw the war very differently and that doomed the American effort. Of course, communism has been a nightmare for the country. I am highly impressed by the lack of bitterness ordinary Vietnamese people feel towards Americans, something we could all learn from.

You know what that reminds me of - Guantanamo, a deal that recognizes the ultimate sovereignty of the Cuban government there, whatever that means, but gives the territory to the Americans apparently for eternity despite the fierce objections of the Cubans. Treaties are binding on the weak.